The Messengers
by Ministry Agent
Summary: The beauty of the Martian sunset. The stars. The moons. Akito and Yurika's last night together. It would be the romance scene of a life-time; if he wasn't 12 years old and she wasn't a psychological wingnut. (With Short Vignette Included Free of Charge)


_Nadesico is owned by ADV Films. All rights belong to them._

  
  
  
  


**THE MESSENGERS**

"Do we have to do this?"  
"Uh-huh."  
"But... why?"  
"Because."

Akito Tenkawa thought about that for a moment and then turned his attention heavenwards. The Martian sunset was just beginning and just above the ring of rainbow nanomachines that fanned out across the uppermost horizon you could just pick out Phobos starting to burn its dull black shape into the orangey hue of the sky. Of the two moons he preferred Phobos. It was rugged and pitted and scarred and, he thought, sort of manly in a non-organic, non-gender specific way. Deimos, on the other hand, was smoother and looked more like a marble.  
If he were a moon, he'd want to look like Phobos.  
"What are you doing, Akito?" asked Yurika. She scanned the sky - in entirely the wrong direction - and then gave up and stared at a half sunken tin can for a while. That, thought Akito, was something Yurika would do. Only Yurika could miss the sky.  
He stood up, brushed his trousers free of dust and then kicked the tin can clear over the hillock.  
Yurika looked at him. "Hey! What did you do that for, Akito?"  
"You were spacing out again."  
She stared at him. Or through him. Or at least, her eyes made some sort of movement which gave the distinct impression that they were staring at something.  
"Exactly like that." He sighed and scratched his hand. The IFS was beginning to itch again. "What are we doing out here anyway?"  
This seemed to pique her wandering interest, and Yurika's face broke into a cheerful, if mischievous, grin. "That's a secret until we get there," she said simply. And she giggled.

Akito didn't much like secrets. Well, actually that was wrong: he liked secrets, but only as long as they were his secrets - and they remained exactly as they were. Other people's secrets seemed to suffer from a distinct lack of secretiveness. This was particularly prominent in those cases where the secret happened to involve Yurika.  
Even more so if it was 'cute' and involved Yurika.  
And woe betide those few bits of hush-hush info that managed to involve both ponies _and_ Yurika.  
Fortunately very few of Akito's secrets involved ponies or cute things (apart from in one notorious case that he didn't really want to dredge back up), but nonetheless most of them involved Yurika. 

The great sweeping dust dune, interspaced with the odd patch of pointy grass or tuft of flowers, rolled upwards in a gentle hill to an apex some few dozen yards away. This was The Hill, so called because it was the only major hill around Rainbow Town. It looked very tall. Akito, as well as disliking secrets - and Yurika - and Deimos - and cute things (especially ponies) -, hated hills.  
He also hated walking up hills.  
Yurika, being Yurika, liked walking up hills. In fact, Yurika liked walking everywhere. Unless there happened to be a pony present, whereupon she would much prefer to use the pony as a transportation method. 

Putting the words 'pony' and 'present' together wasn't something Akito really wanted to do and remember, so he pretended he hadn't. Instead he scratched his IFS again and watched Yurika climb the hill. 

The day had started out much like any other day in Akito's life. The fact that it was a weekend hadn't really changed anything much because Akito's weekends were spent very much the same as his weekdays. That was, being alone. Alone, that is, except for Yurika.  
There was some truth in being alone in a crowd, and doubly so if Yurika happened to be the only crowd to hide in.  
The mornings of the weekends were spent at cooking lesson with a certain Mr. Onikirimaru, a tall, bullish man with a face like a septic ant-bite and an unerring accuracy with flung cutlery. These mornings were usually better than the school day mornings where he faced his peers and their brutally unerring accuracy with barbed wit about his hair and probable sexuality, and his teachers who had an even more finally tuned and unerring barbed wit about his school-work... and probable sexuality.  
Mr. Onikirimaru, thankfully enough, was a practising homosexual and so Akito didn't have to worry about jibes here. Rather he just had to remember not to make any obscure gestures with the fruit. Especially carrots.  
Once the culinary lectures were completed he was allowed to spend the rest of the day to himself. Which, to be honest, was actually quite literal, unless Ms. Misumaru happened to drop by - and that was rather frequent, because although popular and attractive and blessed with certain things Akito lacked (such as, for instance, breasts and a good haircut), she also seemed to have less of a life than terminal road-kill.  
Akito found this somewhat perverse, considering the fact that she was a good three years older than him - and girls were kinda icky - but altogether, he supposed, it wasn't half as bad as being called 'fag breath' or beaten with a wooden spatula. Both of which were also rather frequent in his average week. 

Today had started out much like any other day. It was upon returning home that things got rather... peculiar.  
For one, Yurika was sitting on his front-door step and was watching the road for him. She seemed to have forgotten, however, that he walked in the direction that he always walked and not, as she seemed to be contemplating, down from the sky. This allowed him to tread the pavement, turn off into his front-garden, march straight past her and unlock his front-door before she actually realised he was there.  
"Oh, Ak-" she managed to say, before he slammed the door on her face.  
He dumped his bag in the hall and went into the kitchen. His mother was sitting at the table and, without bothering to give her a glance, he sauntered over to the fridge and opened it in order to get himself a drink.  
"Yurika was outside," he said matter-of-factly.  
"That's right, dear," said his mother, who had taken to calling him 'dear' after reading in a book that referring to your child in an affirmative manner aided in their development.  
"She," said Akito, sticking his head into the fridge, "is such a nutbar."  
"Akito!" His mother snapped, almost embarrassedly, "don't say that! It's rude!"  
"Oh, that's perfectly okay," said Mrs. Misumaru - who happened to be sitting opposite her, "let the boy say what he means. It's the only time they'll get to say it; when they're boys."  
Akito closed the fridge door and looked at both his mother and the next-door-neighbour, Mrs. Misumaru.  
Mrs. Misumaru was an enigma, as far as Akito was concerned. She and her husband, Mr. Misumaru - or Kouichiro, as Akito's father called him when he visited - had moved next-door with Yurika when Akito was five - two days, in fact, before his second-fifth birthday.  
(Due to Mars' orbiting of the Sun, the only way to measure age properly was to give everyone two birthdays a year. That way they kept at roughly the same age as their Terran counterparts.)  
Mrs. Misumaru was a Group Commodore in the United Earth Armed Forces, a joint-analyst for the Martian Colony's think-tank on combined planetary defence operative and also very pretty. Actually, Akito knew that she was _exceptionally_ pretty and so he gathered would Yurika be in a few years time. They both had the same hair and eyes, although thankfully Mrs. Misumaru wasn't a complete FUBAR in the brains department. Her husband was an Admiral with a moustache that seemed to have mated with a privet-hedge at some point in his life, and he seemed to be a hazy source for Yurika's personal and psychological deficiencies and all-purpose cheerfulness.  
"I'm so sorry," said Mrs. Tenkawa, "it's just a phase he's going through. He'll grow out of it."  
Mrs. Misumaru nodded. "Oh, I know what you mean. Yurika's doing the very same thing - phases..."  
"Ew," said Akito.  
"And interests," continued Mrs. Misumaru conspiratorially, and she looked about herself for a moment, "B-O-Y-S."  
Mrs. Tenkawa, who had only started paying attention to boys when she had been told by friends that males knew a lot about the 'Big Bang' and other 'theories', made a silent - if rather humoured - 'Oh' of surprise and then looked at Akito.  
"Ew," said Akito.  
"Why don't you go outside and play with Yurika?" solicited his mother, perhaps a little too pointedly.  
"She's a nut-" he started. He stopped. "I don't want to." 

His mother, however, seemed to have rather different ideas on what Akito liked and disliked. She looked at him sternly from behind her Nergal-issue spectacles. "The Misumarus are coming around for dinner tonight," she said, motioning at Mrs. Misumaru as she did, "and I think you should get all that energy out of your system before we start cooking. I don't want you leaving half your food in your bowl."  
_Ah-ha! The perfect plan for escape!_ Akito smiled inwardly. "Can I help cook?"  
"Stop being so selfish," said Akito's mother - who had also read that allowing your child to become over-conceited in their skills was as bad as not getting them to extend themselves. "Why don't you be a bit more modest?"  
She thought about that for a moment, and then added; "Like Yurika. You don't hear Yurika showing off about her cooking."  
"That's because she can't cook," replied Akito. 

The slow creep of red that spread across Mrs. Tenkawa's face would have been enough to set Picasso back in his art-supply funds for a good month. Her mouth, which was a rather small and bookish mouth normally, seemed to unhinge and then drop open. She looked at Akito. She looked at Mrs. Misumaru.  
"I'm so, _so_ sorry," she said, the glow from her face starting to melt her amethyst earrings, "he's intolerable."  
"He's right though - Yurika can't cook," came the other woman's sad fact. She shook her head. "I've been trying to teach her how to cook SU-Rations and MRE's, but..." She trailed off.  
"Oh."  
"She's very good at chess though," said Mrs. Misumaru. "And Jeet Kune Do." She thought about that. "I think it's a spontaneity thing." 

There was a rather uncomfortable pause. 

"How would you like to help Yurika learn to cook?" asked Mrs. Tenkawa. She turned back to the large, Akito-shaped hole in her kitchen. From the front of the house there was the sound of the front-door opening, a girlish hello, and the bang of the door shutting again.  
"Aw," said Mrs. Misumaru. "Your son is so kind-hearted..." 

Dinner was served at seven sharp and the two younger members of the families skipped merrily home after an afternoon of frolicking on the banks of the lake. Well - at least one had been frolicking. And, to be honest, only one of them skipped.   
Almost as a body they sat around the dining table eating Mrs. Tenkawa's sweet-and-sour pork and rice, and talked idly into the night - while Akito attempted to ignore the girl that was sitting next to him and was trying to engage him in leisurely dialogue.  


It was around about the third glass of wine, and with the second helping of pork-cutlet in sweet-and-not-particularly-sour sauce (the reason for which could well be attributed to the fact that at the same time that Mrs. Tenkawa was avoiding prospective young males, she was also avoiding the prospect of having to cater for post-prospective males at a later date), that Mr. Tenkawa opened his mouth.  
And inserted his foot.  
"Teleportation," said Mr. Tenkawa Ph.D, M.D. BSc, "is going to be the next big thing."  
"Teleportation?" Adm. Misumaru asked. He lifted some food to the mouth that was swamped under his bravura facial hair and cocked an eyebrow.  
"Instantaneous movement between two points in space;" replied Mr. Tenkawa. He put his chopsticks down and stared at his next-door neighbours across the lacquered finish of the table. "Well, technically instantaneous. We haven't ironed the kinks out yet - OW!"  
"Ow?" Mrs. Misumaru put her chopsticks down also and looked at him.  
"Yes - Ow." The scientist leant down a little and rubbed his shin under the table. "Anyway, think of the possibilities! We could cut travel between Earth and Mars to about..."  
"Zero?" Mrs. Misumaru hazarded, being the rather more intellectual of the two UEAF officers at the table.  
"Yes!" The other man stared at her in a manner, and moved his hands as he spoke in a way, that was perhaps a little too over-embellished to be perfectly innocent in its intentions. "Zero! Don't you see it now?"  
Mrs. Tenkawa's tight and bookish mouth tightened ever so slightly more bookishly.  
At the same time Mrs. Misumaru had leant forward and seemed to be plumbing the depths and insinuations of space/time travel (or at least, so hoped Mrs. Tenkawa) in her mind. "Instantaneous movement," she said. She leant back in her chair in a style that was practically pornographic - right index finger hovering tentatively at the side of her mouth - and sighed... wobblingly.  
Once again Akito was struck by the uncanny resemblance between Yurika and her mother. And it frightened him.  
"Instantaneous movement," said Adm. Misumaru turning to his wife. "Think of the possibilities."  
"Yes, Dear. Entire sections mobilised in seconds..." The green eyes lit up with excitement. "Battles won in minutes!"  
Mr. Tenkawa blinked. "Erm..." he said.  
However, the Misumarus weren't listening. The elder female's breathing picked up as her eyes glazed over. She stroked her neck slightly. "We could move those prototype Aesti-machines into a hot-zone without alerting the enemy!"  
There was a moment or two of silence as her breathing returned to a more normal rate.  
"That... erm... I didn't... really think of it from a military viewpoint," a rather burgundy Mr. Tenkawa said. He looked at Mrs. Misumaru, who was readjusting her blouse. "Anyway, we've been having tro- OW!"  
"Ow?"  
"No, no. It's nothing..." said Mr. Tenkawa soldiering on bravely in the face of adverse leg pain. He leant-to, rubbing his shin vigorously. He started again: "We've... OW!"  
"Are you okay?" asked Adm. Misumaru, who was still eating.  
Mr. Tenkawa nodded slowly. "Yes. I just keep getting this stabbing pain in my shin." 

Mrs. Tenkawa's lips, which had been growing tighter and tighter and more pursed over the conversation, suddenly split into a wide and easy smile. "Oh, I'm sure it's nothing, dear. It's probably just cramp."  
"But I don't-"  
"It's cramp." The look she gave him was enough to melt pure silicon. He attempted to return the favour but fell slightly short and instead he looked at the table.  
"Yes, Dear. It's probably just cramp." 

"Now," Mrs. Tenkawa beamed, standing up. "Who wants dessert?" 

And it was after that Akito and Yurika had been expelled from the house to go out and play while the adults had 'grown up talk'. What that meant exactly, Akito wasn't sure, but Yurika had said that she'd seen a film once where all the grown ups had put their car-keys in a fruit-bowl and then they'd swirled them around and they'd taken out the car-keys and they'd gone home.  
Yes, Akito had replied, but that doesn't _mean_ anything.  
Yurika had agreed. Plus she hadn't seen the end of the film. But from what she gathered, it probably meant that adults liked trying to find their car-keys. She'd taken to hiding her father's for a while, but that had petered out a couple of years back when she'd subsequently forgotten where she'd hidden them and three months later they'd turned up in the lost-property box at a train-station in San Francisco.  
Which was funny, because Yurika didn't remember leaving them _there_.  
In any case 'grown up talk' was the sign that Akito and Yurika had better leave the house and find something constructive to do. Like poke nanomachine clusters with sticks. 

So here they were, clambering up The Hill - with the sun setting slowly behind it, the twin moons clawing their ways across the horizon and the thin vapour trails of ships entering and leaving lower atmosphere cobwebbing their way across the sky. It was actually rather impressive, if he could be bothered to care.  
"Where are we going?" he called up at the retreating back of his 'friend'.  
Yurika looked back at him over her shoulder. "You'll see."  
"I don't want to _see_. I want to know!"  
"Just a little further." 

Akito didn't like the sound of that. He was tired and he was dirty and he'd just eaten two bowls of his mother's cooking and he wasn't in the greatest of moods, and not to mention the fact he was being led by a girl whose school-report listed her as 'out of her depth in a parking-lot puddle'. It was pathetic. And he was missing the television.  
"Why have you stopped, Akito? Did you see something interesting?" drifted a very feminine voice behind him. "You're so lazy."  
Yurika was such a nutbar-ditz-idiot, he thought. Some days he just wished she'd just disappear. Vanish. Evaporate into the ether with nothing but a waft of her own good-humoured, clumsy, smilingly asinine self, lingering as a reminder for people to not act so nonchalant all the time. He'd build a big statue warning people against being like Yurika, with a plaque commemorating the sacrifice she made to tell people about the dangers of being a nutbar.  
Then, at the same time, he had to tell himself off for being so unkind to her. Not that he was particularly. He just couldn't understand why (or how) she was so cheerful all the time. It was like she'd built a big wall around herself, and she didn't bother worrying about anything that didn't fit into the miniature existence that resided within that wall. There was the inside, where everything that mattered was - and there was the outside, where everything else was, and that bit didn't matter.  
She was always copying his school-work and homework because of that. And she didn't have very many friends either - which he assumed was because of that also. There was himself, and a couple of girls that she talked to in school (but he'd never seen her with them after school or on weekends, so he didn't know whether they were really friends) and that, as the proverbial 'they' said, was that. Then again, he didn't have any friends either. Just Yurika. He seemed to be one of the few people she wanted inside that little universe of hers, and he didn't know whether he should be flattered or run screaming. Sometimes he did both.  
That was Yurika, in a nutshell. Or a nutbar. Or whatever. 

"Akitooo! Akito! Come on! Please!" The voice continued shrilly. "You'll miss it if you don't come up!" 

He turned on his seat and let his gaze drift up towards her. She was standing on the top of the hill, waving and jumping and calling him. She seemed so energetic that for a moment he felt even more worn out.  
"Oh come on Akito! You know you want to really!" She put her hands on her hips and stared down at him. "Don't make me come and drag you up here."  
Oh well. That was settled. Better to walk up the hill himself than have Yurika grappling with him. That seemed to have become an almost favoured hobby of hers, besides general annoying and (when the mood struck her - often when least expected) kissing him. Fortunately, he'd managed to bravely fend such incidents off, except in one disastrous incident some years ago which he now hoped to forget. It would forever be filed with 'the pony incident'. 

He dusted the dirt off the seat of his trousers and stalked up the remainder of the hill. 

She was waiting for him at the top, grinning happily in the sunset. She grabbed his arm and dragged him towards the other side of the hill - then plonked him down unceremoniously on the newly sprouting grass.  
"See," she said austerely and pointed at the basin. Opposite them, a few miles away, was the twin of the hill they were sitting upon, and down between the tors there was a wide strip of flat reddish-green land.  
With a space-port sitting in the middle of it. Little cars and vehicles darted about its roads like nanobugs. The runway that stretched behind the main brunt of the buildings suddenly seemed to take on a life of its own as a large shuttle began to taxi for take-off. 

"Nobody comes up here, usually," said Yurika as they watched. She sat down next to him and patted her skirt flat. "I like coming up here and thinking sometimes."  
"Oh." Akito pondered on that fact. "When do you do that?"  
"When you're doing your cookery lessons." She nodded her head at the basin of the dale. "That's the USFB Oxie Palus. Daddy works there."  
Akito turned his head back to the base. With the sun setting, and the great orange glow beginning to stain everything, it seemed massive. "I never knew it was so big," he said. And he meant it. "I mean, we have to go past it to get to the lake, but you can only see the front when you ride past it."  
"Uh-huh. Sometimes things are sort of smaller when you look at them from the outside, but on the inside they're a lot bigger."  
The boy's eyebrows scrunched together in confusion. "Er... what?"  
Instead of answering, Yurika patted down her dress some more. She twisted on the spot so that she was facing him, and her face - which was red in the Sun's gaze - seemed deadly serious. "I've got something really important to tell you, Akito - and I don't have a lot of time, so you've really got to listen carefully, okay?"  
"Okay."  
"I'm leaving." 

There was a moment as Akito deliberated over it. "Right," he said.  
The girl's eyes squeezed into slits. "Right?"  
"Where to?"  
Her mouth tightened into a pencil-line. "_Right_?"  
"Where to?"  
Finally she sighed. Then: "Earth."  
"Oh. That's nice."  
"I'm leaving tomorrow." She turned back to the view of the airbase, and Akito turned to face her.  
"Tomorrow? Why?"  
A happy smile. "I'm going to be a UE officer!"  
"Girls can't be UE officers," retorted Akito haughtily.  
"Yes they can. My mom's one."  
"But girls can't be pilots."  
"Yes they can."  
"No they can't. Haven't you ever seen Gekigangar?"  
"No."  
That threw him. He opened his mouth. Then he closed his mouth. Then he opened it again. "Well..." he said. "Well, anyway, it says that girls can't be pilots. They don't have..." He tried to remember where it had said that but he couldn't. So he decided to paraphrase Ken's line from Episode Five. "A hero has to have the guts and the skills and the... the belief to do it." That didn't exactly tie in with girls, so he added; "and girls don't have that."  
"I'm not going to be a pilot. I'm going to be a captain. My Daddy put me down on the UE Academy's entrance list. And a few days ago they sent a letter saying I'd been accepted. So I'm going to the Academy - first I'm going to New York, then Japan and then I'm going to do efficiency progress training in Europe. And I have to leave tomorrow for the opening semester."  
It seemed a bit sudden to Akito. He stared at her face for the crack of a smile or the hint of a Yurika joke. "Tomorrow? Really?"  
"Yeah."  
There was no smile.  
There was no Yurika joke. 

"You can visit if you want," she said after Akito turned back to the shuttle-launch. "I know you always wanted to see Earth."  
"What will you be doing there?"  
Yurika shrugged. "Well, in New York they'll make me do some tests and if I pass I'll go on to other lessons."  
He nodded leisurely. "What's efficiency progress training?"  
She shrugged again. "I don't know."  
"You'll have lots of friends there. People like you."  
"Uh-huh. I guess." The girl sniffed quietly. "They're all people who like chess... and Jeet Kune Do."  
"And ponies?"  
"I don't know. Maybe the girls will. Are you okay, Akito?"  
"Yes."  
"You look sad. Are you going to miss me?" She shuffled crablike towards him.  
"No." He shuffled sideways away from her.  
She sat in the space he'd been in prior. "You can visit really. You can stay with me and we'll go to the seaside." She looked at the floor and surreptitiously began to slide towards him again.  
Akito shuffled further away. When she'd stopped, he made sure to shuffle away another couple of feet further, just in case she decided to follow him again. "I wish I could be a captain."  
"But you wanted to be a chef. The best chef. And I want to be a captain. The best captain." She didn't move as she spoke, but she nodded her head strongly. "You can't be both things."  
"No. I suppose." Akito rubbed his IFS in the twilight. It had stopped itching awhile ago - he'd just failed to notice. Now with all the talk of ships and space it suddenly seemed very conscious on his hand.  
"I wish you could come," said Yurika, almost to herself. "You could look after me."  
"Captains don't need looking after."  
"Sometimes they do." 

They sat and watched the shuttle take-off. It wasn't until it was a tiny speck in the sky before Yurika spoke again. 

"Will you come and wave me off?" she asked.  
"Wave you off what?"  
"My shuttle leaves after school at the civilian port near the Nergal labs." She stroked the ripples of her dress flat with the palm of her hand. "Your Mom and Dad would be there, so I thought... maybe..."  
"I'd come and say goodbye?"  
She peaked at him from the corner of her eye. "Would you?"  
"I suppose." He paused. "Yurika... I'm sorry about being so nasty sometimes. It's just that-" 

"Wait..." The sudden strength in Yurika's words snapped Akito from his thoughts. She was sitting on the brow of the hill, her dress still pooled out about her and still in the breezeless air. She was staring out across the dell, though this time not with her usual semi-catatonic gawk, but with an almost religious fervency. He followed it.  
There was only the thinnest of colours low on the horizon now. A vague, blue-purple-yellow colour that seemed almost to be an inch high was stretched above the hill opposite their own. The UEAF Space-Port's lights flickered on.  
One by one the individual lights snapped into illumination. Like a rolling tide of pin-pricked white the buildings windows were lit up. The roads', paved with lamps, suddenly brightened in a wave of electric incandescence. The runway, which was already half-lit, suddenly started glowing with reds and greens.  
Akito watched as the world woke up to darkness. "That's-" he started to say in awe, but Yurika cut him off.  
"Not that, Akito! Look!"  
She pointed at the sky. 

Akito took one last look at the spectacle beneath him and then raised his eyes. And blinked. And then his mouth fell open.  
With the vapour-trails and satellites and nanomachines hidden under the late hours of darkness, the sky had become a join-the-dot maze of stars. They were everywhere. The only thing Akito could compare it to was if someone had flicked paint over a black tarpaulin, but less messily.  
There was the Plough (which looked more like Orion's Belt because of the angle of vision), and Ursa Minor, and The Cowboy, and Pisces and Orion's Belt (which looked like the Plough because Akito had mistaken one for the other). Over there, just to the right, was Earth, a little glittering dot - little larger than the stars around it - shimmering lazily like a thumb-tack on the Dulux dotted tarpaulin that was space. Then, over to the left, were numerous constellations that Akito didn't know the names for, but looked very impressive.  
Yet all that came second to the spectacle ahead of him. 

Deimos and Phobos were reaching their peaks and from the incline of their travel and the machinations of the Sun, they were glowing. Phobos was gleaming silver and Deimos was shimmering electric-blue, the soft haze of coronas beginning to play around them as they moved closer together.  
Closer together...  
Akito looked at them. Yes, they were definitely getting closer to together. Far closer than he'd have imagined they could go. They seemed to be barely an inch away from each other now, and still they were climbing and spinning towards each other.  
"I wanted to show you the moons," said Yurika from beside him in the twilight. "When it's dark you can see them properly. And it's better up here because the base lights don't shine upwards enough to hide them."  
Akito nodded, although he didn't really know what she meant.  
Half an inch away now.  
Beside him, Yurika sat back and rested her weight on her arms. "I wanted to show it to you. Before I left."  
"Oh."  
"I thought it was really pretty," she continued - although there was something a little more sultry to the words.  
Akito was too busy watching the moons to notice, however.  
"I was hoping we'd be able to sit up here and watch them. You know..." She picked at her dress. "_Later_. When we were grown up."  
The two moon were now a half-finger-nail from touching and Akito suddenly realised where he'd seen this sort of thing before. Gekigangar, Episode Nine, where Kraal Kaarvaak - the Demon Sultan of Idoria, had unleashed a small asteroid at the Moon in order to knock it into the Earth, whereupon the tragic concussion would force the third planet to perform a little trick-shot around the Solar System before potting it in a handily placed black-hole.  
He pointed at the imminent death of everything he held dear and proposed a warning to Yurika: "Gah..."  
"Gah?"  
"Gah..." said Akito. He decided it probably wasn't the best warning he'd ever done, but at least he had her attention.  
"Ooh," replied Yurika, dress still clutched gingerly in her hands, her train of thought suddenly derailed, "they've started converging." 

"They're going to crash?" Akito yelped, and he was overtaken with the contemplation of Yurika and himself on the shelter-less hillock being atomised into very tiny and unhappy parts in the resulting cataclysmic explosion. It wasn't a particularly nice contemplation, even if he didn't get atomised alone.  
"You're silly, Akito." Yurika pointed again. "They're not really anywhere near each other. They just look like they are. Every three weeks the moons pass each other."  
"Oh."  
"Look!" A shout, and Yurika jumped up, waving her finger at the vista. 

High above, the moons' coronas seemed to touch each other and glowed a harmonious mirage of squiggles that made Akito's eyes feel like they'd been wrapped in gauze. He blinked away the fuzz and looked again. The moons were linking together, end to end - Phobos and Deimos together. The rough, pitted masculine body of Phobos seeming to flow into the smooth glossy finish of Deimos.  
It was beautiful. Really, really beautiful - and for the first time in his young life Akito was struck by the intrinsic splendour of nature in all its forms. He looked at Yurika. She was too busy watching the moons to notice him. Her eyes shone with the reflection of the heavens.  
She was beautiful too.  
"It's..." said Akito. He stopped and wondered how to put into words what he wanted to say. He wanted, on the one hand, to thank her for showing him this - something which quite evidently was rather special to her. Yet, on the other hand, he didn't want to seem too... so... forward about it. Oh, the troubles of youth.  
"It's," he thought about the next part: "Sort of nice, isn't it?"  
"Uh-huh." She tilted her head slightly and smiled. "The moons _are_ really nice. Especially Deimos." She turned her gaze to him. "If I were a moon, I'd want to be just like Deimos." She caught the look on his face and raised her eyebrows quizzically.  
The moons sucked themselves slowly into each other and for a moment there was the fusion of coronas. Blue and silver intermingled. 

"I hate moons," replied Akito. 

  
  
  
  
  


**THE SHORT:  
The Importance Of Being Honest**

The room was white. Everything in it - the walls, the carpet, the ceiling, the doors, the bed, the linen, the fittings, the picture frames, the decking, was all white or in a shade of slightly-off-white alabaster. Somehow it was very fitting, Akito thought as he lay on the bed, the pearly duvet pulled up to his waist. He lay there, with his arms folded behind his head, and he smiled with the slight and easy smile of a man who was in love. Not that he would have known such a smile, if he were to see it.  
Actually, to say the room was entirely white would be a lie. There were a good number of aspects that weren't white. For instance, there was the brown teddy-bear that was sitting on the chair by the door. On top of the dressing cabinet, with its assortment of fine fragrances and lipsticks (which weren't white either), there was a very colourful photograph of a pleasant young woman flashing 'Vee!' at the camera in an almost spastic fashion. The clothes strewn hither-and-thither all over the room certainly weren't white either.  
Well, some of them were. The military dress uniform and cap were white. And so was the bra.  
And the trousers.  
But the majority weren't. The gold assistant-galley-NCO's top and black trousers, for example.  
Plus the red boxer-shorts were unjustifiably striking.

However, Akito wasn't interested.  
Nor was he interested in the striking effervescence his auburn hair played upon the soft snow of the pillow his head rested upon. He certainly wasn't fervent about the rough pink hue of his flesh set against the immaculate ivory of the bed's linens. What did arouse and pique his interest, on the other hand, was the long purple tress of hair which ran down Yurika's back and draped itself across the bed-sheets barely a foot away from him.  
And by arouse, I don't think it needs much explaining.  
She lay on her side, half-dozing in the simple pleasures of her first foray into post-coital bliss, her skin taken on the blushing and tinged roseate one might find in one so allured by such things. The bedcovers were pulled up to just above the small of her back, so that the firm (but as Akito knew, rather malleable) shape of her body could be traced beneath the outlines of the cloth.  
He shuffled closer to her, rolling onto his side as he did so (making sure not to touch certain parts of the bed too heavily) and pulled himself up behind her. He traced his hand down her side, feeling her shudder comfortably beneath it, and rested his cheek on her shoulder.  
"We should do that again sometime," he whispered with that hushed smile on his face.  
"I don't know, Akito," muttered Yurika, her eyes still closed, "I can only be a virgin once."

  
  
  
  
  


**THE SHORT   
(Ending II):  
The Trifling Of Being Frank**

Akito shuffled closer to her, rolling onto his side as he did so and pulled himself up behind her. He traced his hand down her side, feeling her shudder comfortably beneath it, and rested his cheek on her shoulder.  
"We should do that again sometime," he whispered with that hushed smile on his face.  
"I don't know, Akito," muttered Yurika, her eyes still closed, "it wasn't very good."

  
  
  



End file.
